NOTES# Encyclopaedia Judaica (1997 CD ROM edition).1. The claim found elsewhere on the Internet that the mother of Albert Abraham Michelson was not Jewish is untrue. The biographical profile of Michelson written by the Nobel Prize winner Robert A. Millikan in the Biographical Memoirs of the US National Academy of Sciences (National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, 1938, Vol. XIX) quotes (on p. 128) Michelson’s sister, the novelist Miriam Michelson, as having written of her parents in a letter to Millikan that "both Albert Michelson’s father and mother were born of Jewish parents…" The contrary claim seems to have originated in a book titled The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson, by Dorothy Michelson Livingston (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1973). Dorothy Livingston was a daughter born to Michelson’s second (non-Jewish) wife when he was already past fifty. Although Livingston admits that she knows almost nothing directly of Michelson’s life prior to his second marriage, she states (on p. 12) that "Albert’s mother was born Rosalie Przylubska, the second of three daughters of Abraham Przylubski, a Polish businessman from Inowroclaw near Strzelno. The family name and a picture of her mother suggest that she came from typical Polish peasant stock. Her older sister Auguste married a doctor and perhaps it was at their wedding that Rosalie first met Samuel Michelson, a young merchant of Jewish descent…" Note that Livingston does not say "according to my father…" or "according to relatives…," rather she just speculates that the name "Przylubski" is non-Jewish. But the name "Przylubski" is, in fact, found amongst Jews; see, e.g.,http://www.avotaynu.com/books/MenkNames.htm. Indeed, Lars Menk’s A Dictionary of German-Jewish Surnames (Avotaynu, Bergenfield, NJ, 2005) gives (on p. 601) "Inowrazlaw" in East Prussia as a location where, according to the civil records, the name was found amongst Jews.

2. Jewish mother, non-Jewish father.

3. Pauli described himself as being three-quarters Jewish in a letter to the director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Frank Aydelotte, quoted in the April 1995 issue of Physics Today (p. 86). See also http://www.ethbib.ethz.ch/exhibit/pauli/ausreise_e.html. According to the family-authorized biography of Pauli by Charles Enz, No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli (Oxford, Oxford and New York, 2002, pp. 1-7), three of Pauli’s four grandparents (all but his maternal grandmother) were Jewish. Specifically, Pauli’s father, Wolfgang Pauli, Sr. (originally Wolf Pascheles, whose parents came from the prominent Jewish Pascheles and Utitz families of Prague), converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism shortly before his marriage in 1899 to Bertha Camilla Schütz. Bertha Schütz was raised in her mother’s Roman Catholic religion, but her father was the Jewish writer Friedrich Schütz (whose biography can be found on p. 469 of Vol. 5 of S. Wininger’s Grosse Jüdische National-Biographie). Although Pauli was raised as a Roman Catholic, eventually he (and his parents) left the Church.

16. See The Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry, Biographies A-I, edited by Herman Branover (Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 1998, p. 37). NB: This reference includes biographies of individuals who are both of Jewish and of half-Jewish parentage, but does not generally specify which is, in fact, the case. Based on name analysis alone, Alferov’s father, Ivan Karpovich Alferov, was most likely not Jewish; his mother’s maiden name was Anna Rosenblum. See also biography in LENTA.RU, the second sentence of which translates as "His parents - Ivan Karpovich and Anna Vladimirovna – a Belorussian and a Jew(ess), themselves came from the small town of Chashniki in Vitebsk Oblast."

21. Gustav Hertz (1925) and Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963) were, and Aage Bohr (1975) and Frank Wilczek (2004) are each one-quarter Jewish by descent. [For a reference on the Jewish ancestry of Maria Goeppert Mayer, see Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics by Edward Teller (Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA, 2001, p. 119). On Frank Wilczek, whose paternal grandfather was Jewish, see the interview with him in Candid Science VI: More Conversations with Famous Scientists, by István Hargittai and Magdolna Hargittai (Imperial College Press, London, 2006, p. 865).]

We had previously listed Pyotr Kapitsa (1978), based on numerous accounts of his having had a Jewish mother; see. e.g., Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. 10 (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, p. 747). However, the fact that he is not listed in the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, for which his son Sergei is a consultant (see http://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/rje_k.htm), together with questions raised by several highly informed members of the Russian-Jewish émigré community, have led us to remove his name. The misidentification appears to have arisen from Kapitsa’s extensive involvement with the so-called Jewish Antifascist Committee. Contained below is a summary of the evidence we had previously cited in that connection:

Kapitsa was one of the speakers at the "Rally of the Representatives of the Jewish People" which Stalin ordered to be held in Moscow on August 24, 1941. Kapitsa and the others in attendance signed an appeal directed to their "brother Jews throughout the world"; see Stalin Against the Jews, by Arkady Vaksberg (Knopf, New York, 1994, pp. 107-108). Yehoshua Gilboa, writing in The Black Years of Soviet Jewry (Little, Brown, Boston and Toronto, 1971, pp. 79, 362), states that the appeal was addressed to "our Jewish brothers the world over" and "was signed by persons who had not only never associated themselves with things Jewish, but whose Jewish or semi-Jewish origin had hitherto been a secret. The JAC’s image was greatly enhanced by such names as Professor P. Kapitza,…" Gilboa quotes Solomon Mikhoels, the head of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC), as stating in a speech on the occasion of Kapitsa’s fiftieth birthday that "I have gone to great pains to spread the fact of your being a Jew…" In Stalin’s War Against the Jews (Free Press, New York, 1990, pp. 176-181), Louis Rapoport describes the denouement of the "Doctor’s Plot," which was designed to be the pretext for the deportation of most of Soviet Jewry to slave labor camps in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Birobidzhan. Show trials of the accused doctors were to be followed by "spontaneous" rioting against the Jews throughout the Soviet Union, which was to be followed in turn by publication of an appeal to Stalin by leading Soviet Jews requesting that Soviet Jewry be evacuated for its own protection "to the developing territories in the East." The plot was never actually executed because of Stalin’s sudden death on March 5, 1953, and so the appeal was never published, but it has been reconstructed from various sources. It was referred to as "The Statement of the Jews" and contained such phrases as "we, as leading figures among loyal Soviet Jewry…" Although most of those who were "requested" to sign it understood its deadly implications, most were simply too terrified to refuse; according to Rapoport, Kapitsa was among the signatories. [A more recent study, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953, by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov (HarperCollins, New York, 2003, pp. 300-305) reproduces what purports to be the letter in question and a list of its signatories. According to the authors, the letter was discovered fully typeset and ready for publication in Pravda, but it is not known whether the "signatories" had actually signed it. In any case, the list of signatories does not include Kapitsa.]